Tag Archives: mediabolic

A week ago I announced that Jim Schaff would be taking over active duties at Stage Two, and that I’d be focusing on “other stuff.” Today I’m excited to share the stuff: I am joining the management team of Dijit Media as Chief Product Officer, where I’m responsible for product and marketing (here’s the official update). Not only that, my virtually common law married colleague (business partners for much of the past 14 years) and very close friend Adam Burg is the company’s VP of Business Development.

What???

Last Fall, I gave a presentation at the Set-Top Box Conference in San Jose, and the entire drive back I had a feeling of near elation. Not that I had said anything extremely profound, but it was wrapped up in the feeling of doing something I had a lot of passion for – in this case, discussing the future of television. Over the next few months, I spent a lot of time doing research in the Smart TV (also called Connected TV or Internet TV) space, and started seeing some trends emerge, and realized there were some very interesting business opportunities on the horizon.

Adam and I spent months developing a prototype concept of the vision we had, and went to meet with some of the brightest folks we know in the convergence field. One such bright folk was well-known VC Stewart Alsop, who I’ve known since the late 1990s, who introduced us to Maksim Ioffe, CEO of Dijit. In our very first meeting with Maksim it was clear he shared much of the same industry and product vision and philosophy with Adam and me. I’ll keep this part of the story short, as we’ve all seen this movie before – we ended up agreeing to join the company. And there was much rejoicing (yay).

Why Dijit?

The grand vision of Dijit is to create the ultimate “four screen” (phone, tablet, computer, TV) social entertainment experience, one which seamlessly merges disparate products and platforms and content into one single, easy to use, consumer offering. The company is well on its way, and its first product is an iPhone app that enables a really sophisticated, yet elegantly simple control experience for home media centers. As Maksim put it, “Consumers have 21st-century home entertainment experiences but are stuck with remote controls that haven’t been updated since the 1980s.” The company partnered with Griffin to produce the Beacon, a clever take on the “IR blaster” product, and one that’s already receiving solid reviews (and I haven’t even done anything yet!). This is going to be a very exciting company to be a part of, and I’m thrilled to have such an opportunity.

Reminiscing.

I still recall the early days at Mediabolic, where we enabled networked home entertainment solutions that interfaced with legacy, analog consumer electronics devices (yes, we were networking the living room in an era where there were virtually no HDTVs, no YouTube, no Pandora, and no… iPod!). At Mediabolic I learned what it takes to design and build embedded entertainment devices, to work with consumer electronics manufacturers, and the deep set of challenges surrounding the connected home industry (fun trivia: I heard the phrase “this is THE year of the digital home” every single year starting in 2001 – possibly earlier). It was a great experience, and key people from that team now work at amazing companies like Netflix, Rovi Corp (Rovi acquired Mediabolic in 2007), etc.

At Sling Media I had the unique opportunity to work for and with some outstanding individuals, not to mention the position of being tasked with figuring out how to deliver the perfect “living room experience” – only over the Internet. The company’s CEO, Blake Krikorian, taught me the meaning of focusing on every detail and nuance, remaining truly innovative, and keeping the consumer’s wants and needs in the forefront of every product decision. I also had to learn the ins and outs of social media, back in the era before it was called “social media,” where “the bloggers” were a special, hard to understand subset of humanity (or, as I rapidly learned, just cool people). We accomplished a great success building the Slingbox, and I’m proud of the product, the team, and the experience.

Over the past four years at Stage Two, I’ve had tremendous exposure to startups, big companies, CEOs, visionaries, the media, and managing a great team. We literally put companies like Boxee, Bug Labs, and Pogoplug on the map, and have also had the chance to work for well-established firms like Electronic Arts, Best Buy, and VUDU (now Wal-Mart). I’ve learned from entrepreneurs like Jim Lanzone (now president of CBS Interactive), Peter Semmelhack (Bug Labs), David McIntosh (Redux), Rahim Fazal (Involver) and so many others (I’ll write another post in the next little while chock full of shout-outs). I’ve redesigned product experiences for dozens of products, and created marketing/PR/social media campaigns for dozens more, and had the pleasure to work with great teams along the way.

The Future.

And now I’m taking all of the above, and putting it to work at one place. Welcome to Dijit.

This is neither my first foray with i-stage nor first judging with CES. Last year I was a judge for the prestigious Innovations awards. Two years ago I was working with team Boxee when they went to, and subsequently won, the inaugural i-stage event! This plus the three “best of CES” awards I’ve been involved in, and I’d say I’m quite excited about being on the other side of things this year!

We haven’t seen this year’s list of contestants (still two days to enter), but I’m excited to see what’s up-and-coming in gadget land (especially since I like to think I’m already involved with most of the new stuff – so this makes it even more intriguing). I’ll put together some thoughts and recommendations on what contestants should (and should not) do to increase their odds at winning (and while cash is nice (kidding!!!!), I’m more interested in impressive technology and great product experiences).

Google, Intel, and Sony have apparently teamed up (and Logitech too) to develop an Android-based platform for interactive television. Let me start my post with some important background points and disclosure:

I was a cofounder of Mediabolic, a startup who built a platform for connected devices. While there I designed about a dozen “convergence” products (one won a best-of-CES award), and the company eventually got acquired by Macrovision.

I was an early employee at Sling Media, where I was responsible for developing the Slingbox (another best-of-CES award).

I once interviewed at Google for a position in a “google TV” role, but didn’t feel it was a really great fit for me personally (not to mention the commute).

I am currently involved with Boxee.TV, a startup in a highly-related field. There is some amount of overlap here, though that is in no way related to this blog post.

I’ve also worked with VUDU, Clicker.com, DivX, and others on “future of TV” systems, services, and products.

I was on the original working group committees for UPnP (AV) as well as DLNA (even before it was called that).

Through the above experiences, I have seen a lot of failure and some success in the “connected TV” space. But mostly failure.

It’s a space where techies dream, entrepreneurs try, and companies fail. The list of failed convergence companies is notably longer than the list of successes. It’s a field where even Apple, the current king of the world when it comes to entertainment technology, can’t get a reasonable foothold in the home.

Most of the failure is due to deeply entrenched systems heavily controlled by huge corporations with little interest or need to innovate. While we can yell and scream about how bad a job the Cable/Satellite companies are doing at future planning, the blunt reality is it’s hard to argue that it’s necessitated. These megacorporations can drag their feet, and deploy mediocre DVRs and HD services, and consumers (for the most part) are satisfied with their experiences. Further, due to their current business structures, the concept of opening up the market to third-party devices, content, services, or applications is not just daunting, but likely unprofitable.

When I consider the opportunity in the digital home, I am convinced it cannot come about by directly competing with traditional broadcast models. Broadcast TV, and all the services with it, are generally easy to use, convenient to pay for, and effectively “good enough” for most people – making “better than current TV” offerings a significant challenge to bring to market. Historically, the only thing to attract the attention of consumers beyond their existing entertainment solutions are:

Transformative content playback experiences. From VCR to DVD was one example, and from standard definition to HDTV is another. The key word here is transformative – it can’t just be “better quality”, as evidenced by virtually all other introduced formats and technologies based around content.

Notably difference content offerings. Again, moving up to HDTV-enabled set-top boxes was a natural flow, game consoles are the other shining example of a successful category. Boxes that simply deliver “more of the same” or “stuff you can get elsewhere, now get it here (e.g. digital pictures)” are typically not big hits. Consumers have to see some kind of service that’s worth the extra money.

Everything else has failed to make a dent. Most “Internet Set Top Boxes” have been, and will be failures. The typical logic that brings these products to market goes something like “consumers are about to cut the cables for their Internet content, and really hate watching it on their computers.” The evidence behind this claim? It’s in the same folder with the WMD evidence the government started a war for (zing!).

I’m very curious as to the potential from Google, Intel, and Sony. Intel has wanted in on the “connected TV” for a long time (disclosure: they were an investor in Mediabolic), and has never really executed very well. It’s not to say they can’t, but it’s safe to say the space is far far away from their core DNA. Sony too has stumbled frequently in this space (here’s their version of a convergence device). Logitech? See Sony. And then there’s Google.

Part of me thinks Google believes that all devices are effectively the same, and their (limited) success in the phone market implies opportunity in the TV market. Another part of me thinks Google is just so big they take on any sector they see opportunity in. But most of me thinks Google wants to get firmly entrenched in the biggest advertising market there is – television. And as hard as doing phones might be, doing TV boxes is much much harder. Here’s why:

Phones play highly restricted media types. Converged TV devices are expected to play all media types. This topic alone is probably worthy of a blog post, but trust me when I say – it’s hard.

Consumers buy new phones on a recurring basis (multiple times a year in some countries). Consumers replace TVs infrequently, and buy TV “accessory” devices only a couple of times per decade. While the market is huge, it’s hard to get new devices into the home.

Carriers are motivated to push new devices and services into the hands of their customers, it’s part of their business model. TV service providers are not motivated to do so (as discussed above).

As much as phones are “closed systems”, a manufacturer is able to purchase equipment and get a device certified and get it on the network without too much involvement by a carrier. While the path is actually similar (CableCard Tru2Way certification), the realities for both the manufacturer and, more importantly, consumer are much much worse.

Again, as stated above, consumers are generally dissatisfied with their phones (a problem unlikely to go away) and are excited about new ones. Consumers literally dread changing equipment in their living room – even us geeky dads with cool quadrophonic sound.

Now with all that said, I’m truly excited about the future of converged entertainment in (and out) of the home. I remain mostly cynical about seeing any real change anytime soon. I think there are a few companies who have built the right foundation to make some inroads, but I’m hoping everyone involved is prepared to win their “realist” and “slow and steady wins the race” badges over the next few years-to-decade (or longer). Can Google be the catalyst of change, or will they just be the next in the long list of companies who tried and missed the mark?

About

Jeremy Toeman is VP Products for CNET. He has over 15 years experience in the convergence of digital media, mobile entertainment, social entertainment, smart TV and consumer technology. Prior ventures and projects include Viggle, Dijit Media, Sling Media, VUDU, Clicker, DivX, Rovi, Mediabolic, Boxee, and many other consumer technology companies. This blog represents nothing but his personal opinion and outlook on things.